Taken from wanderingsmith as a way to find out tenor-of-your-life-these-days kinds of things.

To Play: Please copy the topics below, give your answers, and then post it in your journal. And as wanderingsmith pointed out: Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.

1. First Name: Since my first name is pretty unique and an easy identifier, let's just stick with Thothmes, shall we? I say things about my kids here, and it would not be fair to them to make their identities transparent.

3. Location: Rural Vermont. I love living where other folks vacation, and having grown up in the ‘burbs outside major cities, I know I'm not suited to life in either of those places. I spent my childhood mostly in suburban Philly and suburban New York City, as well as Burlington, VT, a village in Palestine and Athens, Greece, with summers in the Adirondacks, and the U.P. of Michigan. I've attended school outside Philly and at U of M (Michigan), and everywhere I’ve lived, people have listened to me speak and said “You're not from around here, are you?”

4. Occupation: Stay at home Mom. I teach swimming mornings in July, and have volunteered as a French teacher in the elementary school. But if you think what I do is stultifying and wouldn’t challenge me intellectually, then either the kids you know lack energy and initiative, or you underestimate the joy being with kids brings me. My eldest is now 24 (so I've been at this a while) and my youngest is 7 (so I don't expect to be pink-slipped for a while either). I wanted to be an Egyptologist, and majored in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in college, but it was hard to co-ordinate my husband's medical education with my own, especially since the best place to study Egyptology at the time was at the U of Toronto (I did get in there), and they only took 9 med students from out of Province. My husband was wait listed. Besides, jobs in Egyptology are in cities, and that won't do. (See # 3.)

5. Partner: My dearly beloved husband, lover, soul mate, best friend, partner, help-meet, father of my children, etc. We met at 19 in college, became a couple at 20, and have been passionately and sickeningly besotted ever since. We both came to the relationship…*ahem*…inexperienced (at 20! I know! I know!), married two days after my college graduation and one day after his, at 22, and have never felt the need to look elsewhere. Okay, play elsewhere. We look. Married, not dead! He’s a doctor, a lean 6’1”, bearded, with dark almost-black now graying untamable hair, and the kindest dark blue eyes. If this makes you feel like my life is too soft (and I'm the first to admit that my life has indeed been blessed) the next section will mitigate that.

6. Kids: Four. Two biological, two adopted. Three girls and a boy. Eldest is in I.T. near where she graduated college. She wants to go to med school, but is working on prerequisites and financial issues, so we'll see. She has a wicked dry sense of humor and a true gift for languages. Boy is a junior in college. Studying Computer Science and Philosophy. Wants to be a screen actor, but is realistic about that being a true long shot. Is one of the best-natured people you’ve ever met, and has a knack for making people like him that has his dad and I open-mouthed in amazement. Middle girl is a freshman in high school, naturally amazingly musical, and a gifted piano player, and a pretty decent figure skater. She does well in school, but has some attachment issues (which the counselor seems to feel may stem from parental neglect in her home of origin, but we'll see) so we’re going to family counseling. I hope it helps, because loving and loving, and getting back indifference, and sometimes hate is discouraging. I have faith that it will get better. Life is too short to live in the what-could-have-been, and we are doing all we can, to the best of our ability. She's a great kid, and listening to her play is one of the great joys of my life. Youngest girl (the Whirlwind of Destruction) was a preemie, born at 27 weeks and 1 lb. 10 oz. at birth. She managed to come out of that unscathed, and is now a very bright, very quick, very active, very determined, very destructive little thing, who has some ADHD issues, and who has to be experienced to be believed. Keeping on top of her and ahead of her is nigh impossible, and I'm pretty energetic myself. She leaves chaos and mayhem in her wake, plays hockey like her big brother, figure skates like her big sister, and is very, very lucky that she is so cute (auburn hair, gorgeous porcelain skin, grey eyes, and high cheekbones), outgoing, and engaging, or life would be hard. She never met anyone who wasn't her dearest friend on the spot. As one teacher said “She drives us all nuts, but we all love her.” She loves passionately, and deeply, and is a fiercely loyal little thing.

7. Brothers/Sisters: Father's side – two brothers, ages 44 and 24, none of us share a mother. Mother's side – a brother, soon to be 43, and two sisters, 41 and soon-to-be 35, who have the same dad (who isn't mine). I don't think of any of them as half-sibs. It used up the full reproductive lives of 6 adults to generate the 6 of us, so at least and that has produced only 4 biological grandkids so far, so we aren't the family responsible for world overpopulation.

8. Pets: We currently have 2 cats, one Siamese and one Abyssinian/Siamese cross. Our daughter has the litter mate of the Abby cross with her now. At our most pet-filled period we had 4 cats and a Newfoundland dog. We've always had some kind of pet around. Least lamented [IMHO]? Gerard, the goldfish. My middle daughter won him at a fair. He was a pain to take care of with all that water care, we did everything right according to our fairly extensive research, and he still broke her heart by dying after only a few months.

9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life:

Family counseling for our middle daughter. We desperately want this to work.

Trying to be sure that the Whirlwind of Destruction grows up to want to use her awesome powers only for good. If we succeed, the number of problems the world is facing will be greatly decreased. If she turns to the dark side, the world will have a new super villain.

I'm a diabetic, and I've had a heart attack. I'm strong and healthy now, but the exercise and the diet I am on (I have chopped enough veggies in the past six years to make a life-size model of Mt. Everest. Or at least it feels that way!) take, and always will take, a huge chunk of my time, and too much of my attention. But I am definitely very much healthier than I was six years ago, can run 5 miles over hilly terrain, and have a lovely lipid profile, so it's ultimately a good thing.

On Tuesday my husband has his day off, and the kids are in school. We try to engineer time to ourselves then, but sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the two. When it works, it's the sweetest. We never go out on dates or eat out alone, because we had kids because we enjoy spending time with them, and don't want to leave that to the sitter (for those of you worrying, I do hire a sitter when I teach swimming. They do know how to handle separation), so this is our time to reconnect and talk without little pitchers or interruptions.

10. Who are some of your closest friends: My husband is my best friend. Others include my mother, my dad, my mother-in-law, a former step-mom, my sisters, my two oldest brothers (limited somewhat by the fact that they will seldom talk about themselves and are comfortable with long periods of radio silence), and a handful of college friends. By now my two eldest kids can see me as a friend as well as a parent. My oldest friend that I see regularly I met in the Adirondacks when we were 16. Many of my friends from childhood were guys, including my best friend from infancy to the age of 12, and when I moved away they didn't keep in touch. It's a guy thing. I've always gotten along best with the guys, but it's the girls who seem to be in it for the long haul.

I consider all of you my friends, but I'm relatively new here, so none of you make it into "closest" yet, but stick around. I'm planning to be here for a while. There's hope.

I can't stand cities either. They're nice and interesting to visit, but I could never live there. I need trees and woods and...yeah. heh. :D

And if I were my mental age, I think I'd be about 12. lol. I sadly remember that being the best time of my life. No responsibilities, and life was all about play, play, play! XD I've always had quite an imagination. lol.

I go back and forth about my mental age. Sometimes I think it's 14, sometimes 5, but often the early 20s are about right. Though I definitely still have that sleeping all morning thing from the teen years going on...